Trim Wheel Box

[Roadhouse]

Corsair is the first warbird I've gotten serious about, mostly been flying the Hornet. I found mapping the Corsair trims to hat switches felt less than ideal, so I decided to cook up some trim wheels. 

This uses three B10K rotary linear potentiometers ($10 for a 10 pack on Amazon), an Arduino Micro ($23), and the parts were printed out of PLA (less than $10 in filament), USB micro to type A connects it to the PC. 

I drew the wheels and box in CAD, had ClaudeAI help with the Arduino code and now I have a functional set of trim wheels, each assigned to an axis. 

 

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The wheels turn more or less the same amount as the wheels in the virtual cockpit, and placing it behind the throttle means my hands are pretty much where they show up in sim (using leap motion hand tracker). 

I don't know how long these cheap pots will last, but they work well now and the code filters out noise so they arenull solid and generally do what they're told to do. 

This is a first prototype, so its still a little janky. The neoprene pads around the wheel stems are there to increase friction. Working on a more elegant, internal solution. 

The wheels are a little smaller than the real wheels, next set I will make a little larger and may print them out of transparent polycarbonate. They are unmarked as I am always in VR, but putting position markers on them wouldn't be hard. Considering putting a tailwheel lock on a future version too. 

Sharing this just to see what other ideas people have to improve upon it, and I'm happy to share the CAD, code, and wiring if anyone wants to build something similar. This works for the P47 too and a similar setup could be adapted to pretty much any warbird. 
 

 

[GTFreeFlyer]

Very sweet! I have one in the works as well with working pointer inside the knob.  The pointer rotates at a much slower speed than the knob, as seen in the virtual cockpit.  I hope to make it available soon.  Still working out the right feel to it.  Ignore the green color, this is just a prototype.  

[Roadhouse]

23 minutes ago, GTFreeFlyer said:

Very sweet! I have one in the works as well with working pointer inside the knob.  The pointer rotates at a much slower speed than the knob, as seen in the virtual cockpit.  I hope to make it available soon.  Still working out the right feel to it.  Ignore the green color, this is just a prototype.  

 

That's awesome! Much more refined and authentic. What are you doing on the electronics side? 

[GTFreeFlyer]

4 minutes ago, Roadhouse said:

That's awesome! Much more refined and authentic. What are you doing on the electronics side? 

TBD.  I’ve used the Arduino micro and Leonardo in the past, and they’re great,but will try something different this time around because I’m always striving to learn something new.  At least I have fallbacks that I know work well

[Saxman]

Nice, I'm using one I found on Etsy, lol. I'd love one that actually matches the real console, tho.